after Evening Prayer in the Pro-Cathedral,
a Buddhist monk begs in a tan linen jacket,
wears a canvas fishing hat and extends a bronze
plate, his benign smile accepting the unexpected;
father and son draped in Bohemian scarfs saunter
towards Dalymount for a rendezvous at a pub
on Doyle’s Corner; a Nubian queen walks by
waiting for the 16A or maybe considers the Luas
as a better option, while a motorised wheelchair
silently glides by her, his walking partner nodding,
carries a Supervalu shopping bag, and a Spanish
girl, raven hair with blue stringy streaks, unnoticed
on her mobile, gesticulates impatience with suppressed
panic flicking a reefer tilted delicately in her left hand.

Once maybe, if I were a fisherman, I would now
be imbibing the prairie plains of greying ocean,
my mind reaching beyond any visible horizon,
or a farmer standing in this evening silence
contemplating the swallow-dash and sweep
over hope-bearing meadow, pondering the harvest,
sniff the air, anticipate rain, read cloud formations.

But time costs money when you park your car in Dublin,
over three quid an hour; how much am I willing to spend
to sit, watch, enjoy the rare splash of a May evening sun,
dip behind the shadowing skeletal Carlton?

And now out of a blind spot, Sailor Hat man with
Sigmund Freud beard, sashays a rainbow smock,
sucks on his cigarette, inhaling with brio, exhaling
tight-jawed and paces the street as our new Irish
Chinese, Brazilian and Polish pass by, have no thought
of this evening's reading from Galatians, nevertheless
a harvest of patience, kindness and generosity,
could be in evidence here, and, if not, if muted, at least
Paul’s twelve virtues reside in the mansions of these
passing-by souls and in the salt sweep of wave on shingle,
and in the tree swish across the headland boundaries
where the random ordinary embraces the quotidian
richness of nerve-inducing possibilities.

The rainbow man has disappeared, father and son
a memory, the phone girl long gone, but a ringlet-haired
child in Communion frock skips by, carefree, her pearl
purse and white dress-shoes flounce and dance. And now
the Nubian queen returns to the bus stop, exotic of Africa,
bathed in the same sun as it dips where her mind might be,
her moments and places, her waiting here.